Bridging Hardship, 1928-1945
In the late 1800s and early 1900s many homes in Mississippi and other rural American states did not have indoor plumbing and had inadequate sanitary facilities. Families could rarely afford to install indoor plumbing. Many Mississippians simply did not know how proper sanitary waste disposal and clean-living conditions could prevent diseases. As a result, they were often plagued with diseases that were directly linked to improper sanitary facilities. Hookworm was one such disease.
When Mississippi faced tough economic and social problems after the Great Depression and World War II, Owen Cooper challenged Mississippians to band together and successfully solve them. Whether the need was for rural hospitals and affordable health insurance, production of a fertilizer that increased crop yield for a hungry world, better race relations, or spreading Southern Baptist missions around the globe, Cooper repeatedly led Mississippians to work together and make the seemingly impossible possible.
World War II was truly a world war. All of the major countries and a large number of small nations were drawn into the fight. Even countries that tried to remain neutral found themselves in the conflict either by conquest or by being in the path of the campaigns of the major powers. For example, in 1940, more than a year before the United States entered the war, the major powers — Britain, Italy, and Germany — fought important battles in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya in North Africa.
The Great Flood of 1927 unleashed a spring season of catastrophic events along the banks of the Mississippi River. A weather system that stalled over the Midwestern states in the fall of 1926 brought untold amounts of water to the Upper Mississippi River region. The region’s burgeoning tributaries caused the Mississippi River to overflow in eleven states from Illinois to Louisiana.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mississippi was an overwhelmingly agricultural state. While farming provided a route to economic success for many White Mississippians, a number of White people could always be found at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, a status more typically associated with Black Mississippians in the century after the American Civil War.
- Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
- The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article
- This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
—full text, the Equal Rights Amendment
In 1929 the mayor of Columbia, Mississippi, Hugh Lawson White, gazed out his office window and contemplated the town’s future. Located in the Piney Woods region, Columbia had depended on the cutting and milling of longleaf yellow pine as the principal source of employment for its 4,000 residents. By the middle of the 1920s with the vast stands of pine “timbered out,” the largest companies packed up their machines, sold their buildings for scrap, and moved on to new, more promising locations.
In March 1933, a tall, lanky, sandy-haired man stepped off the train at the Washington, D. C. station. No one greeted him, no band played, hardly anyone knew he had arrived. William M. Colmer had come to the nation’s capital to witness the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and then to represent the people of the sixth congressional district of Mississippi in the Seventy-third Congress.
By 1932 the Great Depression had the country in its relentless grip and most Americans believed that something was very wrong.
Not since George Poindexter had there been a Mississippi governor with a broader range of political experience than Governor James Plemon Coleman. He was also one of the few governors in the 20th century elected in his first campaign for the office.
At the time of his election in 1955, Governor Coleman, who was born near Ackerman on his family farm in Choctaw County, Mississippi, on January 9, 1914, had already served as an aide to a United States congressman, as a district attorney, circuit judge, state attorney general, and justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court.
